by Antonio Napoli
A man woke up in the bed of the king of an African city and looked around, bewildered.
“What am I doing here?” he wondered.
At that moment, someone knocked. “I await your orders, Your Majesty,” said the captain of the guards.
“If this isn’t a dream, it must be a joke,” the man thought. He pinched his cheek and realized everything was real. He, a humble plowman, a mere ox herder from afar, was being treated as a sovereign!
“This man wants me to believe, as a prank, that I am the king. What a strange jest! I’ll play along. But will everyone else?”
He decided to go along with the charade. “Order my horse to be saddled. I will go visit my daughter, the princess.”
The princess, who was in a nearby village to meet her future husband, ran to him with joy upon his arrival. Amused but incredulous, he acted like a king, a father, a future father-in-law, with the dignity the situation required. No one objected; yet, it was as if cheap wine had been poured into the same jeweled cup that once held a precious nectar. At the end of the visit, the princess even gave him an affectionate kiss on the cheek.
“Is this possible? A peasant kissed by a princess?” he thought, feeling his face flush. The gesture flattered him, but at the same time, it made him suspect that behind it all lurked some deception. How could he unmask this farce without compromising himself?
He and his escort returned to the palace after nightfall. “Tomorrow, a grand feast will be prepared in the palace courtyard. The entire people shall be my guests,” he ordered the servants before retiring to sleep.
The next day, at the banquet, nothing unusual happened. “Everyone is playing along with whatever scheme has been plotted behind my back,” he thought, scanning the faces around him. A sense of loneliness engulfed him, different from the one that accompanied him in his days working the fields. There, his solitude was natural, peaceful; here, instead, it was laden with suspicion and fear.
As he satisfied himself with delicious dishes and sipped fragrant wines, the memory of his harsh existence began to dissolve, almost vanish. He convinced himself that this role rightfully belonged to him. Then, however, he snapped out of that conviction, disturbed by the suspicion that all of it was the work of a distant sorcerer, capable of weaving this illusion with a power that stretched beyond all distance. So, at the end of the dinner, he rose and said, “Would any of you dare to tell me to my face that I am not your king?”
A murmur ran through the crowd. Everyone looked at each other, uncertain.
At that very moment, a young man stepped forward and, before the motionless guards, plunged a knife into the man’s chest.
He gasped, staggered. “Was I wrong?” he murmured before collapsing to the ground.
Only then did the guards react and seize the assassin. A man, hidden among the onlookers, stepped forward laughing. Slowly, he untied the turban from his face and revealed his true features, leaving everyone, including the murderer, speechless.
Fearing an ambush, the true sovereign had used the striking resemblance of that poor peasant as a shield. Now, he gazed at the lifeless body at his feet, a shadow of sadness in his eyes.
“What a cruel jest, to leave this world without knowing whether one was a king or a subject,” he whispered, staring at that extinguished face, his unwitting reflection.